King Crimson
THRaKaTTaK

We are in 1996.

For a couple of years, Robert Fripp has set the "Crimson King" in motion again, with an album (THRAK, for which there is a review on DeBaser that I'm not inclined to recommend) and a series of concerts around the world. The lineup is quite unusual: at its core is the quartet that formed the group in the '80s (Robert Fripp on guitar and soundscapes, Adrian Belew guitar and vocals, Bill Bruford on drums, and Tony Levin on bass and stick), further enriched by an additional drummer, Pat Mastelotto, and a bassist-guitarist (who plays mostly the stick or the Warr Guitar), Trey Gunn. The peculiarity is that the six musicians (a "double trio," as Fripp himself defined them) don't play alternating, nor do they play the same things simultaneously. They simply play parts that interlock, counterpoint, and interpenetrate.

This formation records, as I was saying, an excellent album, THRAK, and takes it on tour. King Crimson has always been primarily a "live band," and Fripp knows it well, just as he knows the contribution that improvisation has had on the group's sound, especially in the '70s. For this reason, during the 1995 and 1996 tours, he proposes to the other five musicians to let themselves go into total improvisation during concerts, concentrated however during a single track, THRAK indeed.

Now, maybe it's because THRAK is a chaotic piece in itself, maybe because improvising in six is not exactly easy, maybe for I don't know what else, the fact is that the improvisations that emerge ("thraking," in Fripp's jargon) are chaotic beyond all measure, totally anarchic, to the point that sometimes for the band it is even impossible to return at the end to the initial theme of the piece.

This lack of improvisational capacity will be one of the major flaws of the double trio, and will ultimately seal its fate, but before putting the final nail in the coffin on this ambiguous formation, Fripp decides to release a document to witness this "failed experiment," THRaKaTTaK.

Thus, we have the origin of this 57-minute live consisting almost entirely of totally deconstructed music. It starts, of course, with the first track from THRAK, but when the time for the central improvisation comes, an infinite sound tapestry unfolds, cleverly mixed from the "thraks" recorded on various nights. Listening is a real marathon, one must totally let go into the music, a bit like when listening to certain "free-jazz." The lack of a guiding thread is evident, yet it is enough to focus on a single instrument to realize that, indeed, each musician is trying to propose their melodic line. It is the cohesion that is missing, something that Fripp would desperately seek in the four ProjeKcts that would follow, until rediscovering it in the double duo in the following years.

What remains, in the end, of this THRaKaTTaK? It remains the chronicle of a failed experiment, but a lucid and honest chronicle (Fripp himself wondered, a few months before the album's release, how many fans he would lose by releasing such material). A sort of laboratory report done with extreme care and infinite passion, even if the reaction didn't succeed as hoped. It may not be a five-star album, but it deserves all three. For its coherence, above all, but also for showing that after almost thirty years of career, King Crimson was not a dinosaur, but an agile little mouse ready to hide in the darkest and most hidden crevices.